How the GOP Plans to Attack Hillary Clinton

For better or worse, a central issue in the 2012 presidential race proved to be Mitt Romney’s work at the private-equity firm Bain Capital. Democrats zeroed in on Mr. Romney’s dealings at the company, turning the election into a referendum of sorts on his time at Bain.

Hillary Clinton listens to her introduction before speaking on American leadership a day before stepping down as secretary of state.

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Heading toward the 2016 presidential race, Republicans hope to turn the tables: They want the State Department to become Hillary Clinton‘s Bain Capital.

What did Mrs. Clinton do in her four years as President Barack Obama‘s secretary of state? How much did she accomplish? Where did she falter? These questions will get a full airing should Mrs. Clinton choose to run.

Mrs. Clinton and her allies seem to recognize that and are taking steps to blunt various lines of attack. Republicans, meantime, want her State Department years to become a political liability on par with Bain.

Their case comes down to several points. They say she should be held accountable for the 2012 terrorist attacks at a diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans. They contend she accomplished little as the nation’s top diplomat, with no major peace deal to show for all the miles she racked up.

“I can’t believe that if the shoe was on the other foot and we had a Republican secretary of state with her record running, that the Democrats wouldn’t be going nuts, saying, ‘Show me one accomplishment – one thing you did as secretary of state that helped make the United States national security more secure or helped America’s role in the world,” said Sen. Rob Portman (R., Ohio). “I don’t know where you can point around the world and say, ‘This is a success.’ ”

Finally, Republicans hope to make Mrs. Clinton the face of what they say was a misguided attempt to “reset” relations with a Russian government that has menaced Ukraine and its neighbors.

Here, Mrs. Clinton may have handed them a bit of ammunition: a 2009 photo op in Geneva in which she pressed a big red “reset” button alongside her smiling Russian counterpart.

“This administration said they were going to hit the reset button,” Sen. James Risch (R., Idaho) said at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing this week. “I can’t help think somebody hit the wrong button.”

Yet Mrs. Clinton has a huge platform in which to shape perceptions of her work as America’s top diplomat. She is literally writing her own story about her State Department years: a memoir coming out in June. Then she’ll give a book tour — a national forum that allows her to make the case she helped improve America’s standing in countries worn down by the Bush administration’s long slog in Iraq.

She’ll describe how she used “smart power,” a blend of diplomatic and economic tools that can complement traditional military force.

And she’ll reject the GOP contention she was duped by Russian leaders.

Whatever Mrs. Clinton’s title, foreign-policy making has long been run from the White House. Denis McDonough, a former deputy national security adviser who is now White House chief of staff, once described Mrs. Clinton as the “principal implementer” of the administration’s foreign policy, a phrase that suggests she wasn’t the one crafting policy.

So it’s not necessarily fair to cast Mrs. Clinton as the architect of the Russian “reset,” some foreign-policy experts say.

“On the relationship with Russia, clearly the reset, I would say, was conceived in the White House,” said Angela Stent, author of a new book, “The Limits of Partnership: U.S.-Russian Relations in the Twenty-First Century.”

In recent speeches, Mrs. Clinton has previewed ways she’ll rebut GOP claims that she was naïve about Russian intentions. She has pointed to statements she once made showing she had deep misgivings about Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In 2012, for example, she gave a speech warning of Russian attempts to “re-Sovietize” parts of eastern Europe under the guise of economic integration.

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